Abstract
This study investigates whether rhythmic features are object of accommodation between Grison and Zurich German (henceforth GRG and ZHG) speakers, insomuch as it was previously observed for vowel formants. Cross-dialectal rhythmic accommodation and its evoking/inhibiting factors (e.g., acoustic distance vs dialect markedness, new vs previously heard words) were examined in a corpus of pre-and post-dialogue recordings, performed by 18 pairs of GRG and ZHG speakers. Three rhythmic measures were designed which were based on cross-dialectal timing differences related to intervocalic sonorants gemination, open syllable lengthening and reduction of word-final vowels.
Pellegrino, Elisa